A Passage to India with Andrew Wade

What a rich professional experience my first visit to India proved to be! This is how I came to make the trip: in 1995 I attended the Cicely Berry/Andrew Wade workshop in Tempe, AZ, "Method Versus Language: Ways of Approaching Classical Text in Today's World;" Andrew and I connected during this experience, and he invited me to the Royal Shakespeare Company to "watch the work." On sabbatical leave from the University of Virginia, I spent the spring semester of 1997 with him at the R.S.C. in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is Head of Voice. I was fortunate to observe Andrew actively engaged in the many and varied capacities in which he serves the R.S.C. and the larger theatrical world. I also accompanied him to Wales, Scotland, and Sweden, participating in workshops he gave to various groups. Andrew is rarely able to devote more than a few days to such workshops,owing to the demanding R.S.C. schedule. I was delighted when he invited me to accompany him to India for a two-week, intensive workshop (March 10-24, 1997) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (N.C.P.A.) in Bombay (locally called "Mumbai"). This would be a rare opportunity to watch Andrew, in his own words, "open out" voice work in a concentrated way.

Making a commitment to the trip set off a flurry of harried preparations: applying for a visa at the

Indian consulate in London, getting a plane ticket, and arranging for polio, typhoid and hepatitus A inoculations. I also started a course of anti-malaria drugs by mouth. Andrew would be staying at a guest house in the N.C.P.A. complex, but I arranged to stay at the Chateau Windsor Hotel ten blocks away, only a few hundred feet away from the distressingly polluted Arabian Sea.

I flew Gulf Air from Heathrow, changing at Muscat, Oman en route and at Bahrain on the return trip. My visa was not ready in time to fly with Andrew, so I departed the following day. This was my first somewhat unpleasant experience of insecticide being sprayed in the cabin by flight staff, a legal requirement on these flights. The international range of my fellow passengers gave me a taste of things to come. I had to forego wine with dinner, however, as it was, according to the attendant, "contaminated."

I disembarked at the Mumbai Airport at 5:00 a.m., to the culture shock of a lifetime. The airport appeared to be under construction. Military-looking

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guards surveyed the crowd as I took my place in the long customs queue. Jet-lagged, I recall a swirl of steamy heat, the chemical smell of insecticide, countless clamoring voices and scores of bodies pushing past me to the currency exchange and pre-paid taxi counters. The agent nearly refused to cash my travellers checks because my husband's name also appeared on them. At the taxi counter I was finally able to arrange a taxi by establishing eye contact with one of the agents.

Exiting the airport, I confronted a daunting gauntlet of drivers wildly gesticulating and attempting to usher me into their vehicles. I miraculously found my assigned taxi, and after discussion among several drivers as to the location of my destination, we took off. In fact the taxi seemed to alight and land by turns as we jolted from lane to lane, surging, braking and lurching in a cacophony of cries and honking: a 250 rupee, thirty-kilometer, hour-and-a half long wild ride through sulphurous half-light, emanations of excrement, and faces and bodies looming from the gutter and from openings in hard scrabble shacks lining the road. Women, elegant in saris, walked briskly to work, and beggars sat on piles of refuse and rubble holding out their hands toward the cab as we passed, asking for money.

We approached downtown, the driver stopping repeatedly to ask men bathing in the gutter where we might find the "National Centre." Pointed in several directions, we finally drove through an opening in a chain link fence and stopped before a low brown building. A man came out onto a balcony, peered through the dark, and spoke to the taxi driver. A military- looking guard sprinted from the building, grabbed my bag, and ran back into the building. Panicked, I sped after him, following the bag like a dog on a fox's scent up two flights of stairs, where I discovered that I was indeed at the N.C.P.A. guest house and that Andrew was within. Ten minutes later he emerged from his room to tell me that a car had been sent to the airport for me, showing me the 4 by 15 inch sign with my name scrawled in ball point ink which the driver had held up. No wonder I missed it as I ran the airport exit gauntlet.

Finally the tension that gripped me over the previous twenty-four hours released. I was, as the British say, home and dry. Well, as dry as the sauna-like Indian climate allows.

I was driven to my hotel to check in and then